Look! Up on the screen! It's a galaxy! It's a killer robot! It's . . . VIRTUAL, MAN!

By RICHARD CORLISS

The place seems amiable enough -- cozily Edwardian, beckoning, a lullaby for the senses. Period photos of adventurers, early editions of Jules Verne and Dorian Gray, a mahogany bar where a fellow serves "smart drinks," heavy on the ginkgo. This is the Explorer's Lounge, the front room of a Virtual World shop in the San Francisco suburb of Walnut Creek. But behind the paneled walls, some pioneering menace is afoot. Five kill-crazy nerdlingers will soon engage in mortal combat, 21st century style, against a tenderfoot with a cunning computer handle: Cyber Rick!

The game is BattleTech, a 10-minute interactive video extravaganza that plunks you down on a barren, monolith-strewn spacescape to neutralize a platoon of stealthy robots: your opponents. The process is called virtual reality. And Virtual World Entertainment, which besides the Walnut Creek showroom has retail outlets in Chicago, Tokyo and Yokohama (with a San Diego branch due in November), is just part of this burgeoning blend of art, science and razzle-dazz.

VR is almost everywhere now. Last week in Anaheim, California, a trade show for the Amusement and Music Operators Association displayed Sega's VirtuaRacer video game, Spectrum HoloByte's Star Base One and Visions of Reality's advanced Cybergate. Also last week, a U.S. Army show in Washington featured a VR tank simulator. This week the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan's SoHo district presents a VR exhibition with works by artist Jenny Holzer and composer Thomas Dolby.

For more than a decade, VR has helped pilots in training visualize objects in graphic three dimensions and on a 360 degrees field. Recent advances in reducing both the size and the cost of hardware and software are bringing VR out of the flight simulators and putting it within reach of architects, designers, surgeons and other professionals. "Properly done, virtual reality has an opportunity to change the world," says David Bonini, CEO of Division Inc., whose VR systems help drug researchers assemble "virtual" molecules. "This is only the beginning."

Virtual-reality hype is gradually giving way to virtual-reality reality. "Finally," says Ben Delaney, publisher of CyberEdge Journal, "the technology has met up with the demand. I think we're going to see VR all over the place. It's a better mousetrap, and it's a better way to work with computers." John Latta, president of 4th Wave, a market research firm, predicts that the nonmilitary VR industry, already a $110 million business, will be nearly five times as large by 1997.

Now entrepreneurs large and small have seized on VR, hoping to turn Defense Department-bred technology into show-biz profit. Companies from the Hudson River to Tokyo Bay -- the brand names include Paramount Communications, AT&T, Viacom, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Matsushita, Edison Brothers, Hasbro and Time Warner -- are betting cumulative billions on VR. Christopher Gentile of Abrams/Gentile Entertainment, which is developing a home-VR system in Princeton, New Jersey, predicts virtual game shows by 1996. How about 3-D TV? Shopping by VR? The Home Sex Network? "If someone gets there in the home with the right quality and cost," notes media investor Marty Pompadour, "it's a potential bonanza."

For now, though, VR entertainment is starting to bloom where movies did nearly a century ago: in the arcades. A penny in the slot once offered streetwise strollers a peek at Fatima's dance; now $4 to $30 gets you a sleigh ride on a space ship (in Cybergate) or a fretful stroll through a computerized Acropolis (in Dactyl Nightmare, by Virtuality). And why not the arcades? Video games are a $5.3 billion business in the U.S., about as large as the theatrical movie market.

Not all the effects fit the strict definition of virtual reality. Only a few make use of the computer helmet that guides your wraparound view and allows you to "move" objects in cyberspace. Most are only virtually virtual: variations on arcade games or tweakings of Disney's Star Tours ride, which craftily gyrate a pod in time with jolting screen images. But all the systems have a common goal: to give you a new-horizons, touchy-feely, out-of-mind experience. Virtual reality? Perhaps. Virtual theatricality? For sure.

The games, or rides -- they are so new there is no consensus on what to call them -- are basically complex versions of three familiar movie genres and video-game formats: the Star Wars space adventure (shooting things), the Days of Thunder road test (running over things) and the Rocky boxing match (punching, kicking and gouging people). These are mostly boy toys made for the computer generation. You won't see a VR game of some sentimental senior- citizen film -- unless it's Driving Miss Daisy Crazy, with the flivver flying down back roads and a convoy of rednecks in pursuit.

Movies and TV are passive experiences. The VR games are interactive. And the more active you are, the more you can enter into them. Players who hone their kill skills develop a zestful proficiency; they become self-improvement junkies while the merchants get rich. VR can also be a socializing medium, even of the zap-you're-dead! variety. TV, video games and videocassettes keep folks hermited away; VR gets them out of the house with a new gimmick -- a twist on the lures that '50s moviemakers, faced with the challenge of TV, offered film audiences with Cinerama's roller-coaster ride, 3-D's spears and paddleball, William Castle's Tingler showmanship.

The big difference is choice. The only choice a filmgoer or TV viewer has is to walk out or turn off. Even Star Tours and Universal Studios' Back to the Future ride are, at heart, drive-in movies; you're just driving in a car with no shock absorbers. VR, which lets you wander at will through a force field or minefield, offers a democracy of entertainment. As VR programmer Randal Walser wrote, "The filmmaker says, 'Look, I'll show you.' The spacemaker says, 'Here, I'll help you discover. ' "

And what worlds there are to explore! Though some games are, in one exhibitor's phrase, "obsolete by the time we buy them," and though the images may be at the Pong or Space Invaders stage of sophistication, they do give you the sense of being out there, weightless and heedless, in that mysterious space between your ears.

Some of the rides are almost mystical. In Virtual Adventures, by Iwerks Entertainment, you glide underwater to rescue rare eggs hatched by a benevolent Loch Ness creature. The other games are a mix of Captain Kirk and Beavis and Butt-head; this one is Barney.

For now, true VR entertainment will be a boutique operation; it can't move the bodies per hour that a Star Tours can. But there's still fun for all: consumers and producers. "The great thing about VR is that we get to make up the rules," says Tony Asch, president of StrayLight Corp., designer of the thrill rides Cozmik Debris and Bonk. Companies that had specialized in VR for the military are savoring their new gamesmanship. "For years we've been in the business of re-creating real worlds," says Jeff Edwards, marketing manager for Evans & Sutherland, which developed a Virtual Adventures ride with Iwerks. "Now we're in the business of creating fantasy worlds, and our creators are having a ball."

A wrecking ball, to judge from the competitive carnage unleashed at the Walnut Creek Virtual World. Exiting the Explorer's Lounge, our Virty Half- Dozen are ushered into a briefing station where they watch a slick six- minute instructional film. It stars Joan Severance as a macho pilot ridding the solar system of some intergalactic scum. Just as take-charge is the mission's real-life guide, code name Tiger, a young woman in a lab smock who looks like Winona Ryder and talks like Chuck Yeager. In rapid-fire cadences, Tiger spits out a fat manual of directives for piloting the vehicle behind the next door. Any astronaut or shop major would swill down this info in a trice, but Cyber Rick, the neophyte, is lost in space. So he tries reasoning with his adversaries, battle-hardened BattleTech veterans all. "I come in peace," he says portentously. The gunsels snicker.

In the Containment Bay the pilots crouch in their cockpits and play with their joysticks, throttles, laser-gun buttons and myriad other guy stuff. Then the mayhem commences. Dramatically, the scene is rich -- pilots directing their robots to roam the area and shoot everyone who moves -- but for Cyber + Rick it isn't pretty. He must have left his lightning instincts, his sociopathic aggressiveness, his testosterone, at home. Everywhere he tilts his scanner, the robots are after him. And they're firing like crazy. Go to it, brain! Attack wildly. Retreat cravenly. Mayday! Mayday!

Afterward, an elaborate printout of the combat reveals how merciless video virtuality can be. Read it and weep: "Spydre severely ravages Cyber Rick's left torso . . . Cyber Rick's right torso is vaporized by Rayvin . . . Demon Dave severely damages Cyber Rick's right hip section . . . Steve vaporizes Cyber Rick's searchlight!. . . Cyber Rick ejects as JT reduces Cyber Rick's Loki VI to rubble!" Spydre finishes the combat in first place, tallying 2,570. Cyber Rick pulls a -1,492. Good year, rotten score.

Back in the lounge, the group gets to replay the whole edifying experience on video monitors. There's lots of male bonding and, for Cyber Rick, male gagging. One of the gunslingers helpfully suggests that the loser cram for the next mission with the aid of a flight manual, available in the lobby. "Thanks for the advice," Cyber Rick responds as he slinks away, "and you're real good at killing. Now let's see you write a movie review." A last gasp from the Gutenberg era as it cedes power to a generation of virtual virtuosos.

With reporting by Jonathan Burton/New York and David S. Jackson/San Francisco